After many delays and a ton of anticipation, Suspect Testing is making its triumphant return to Smogon! The OU Council has unanimously agreed to implement a new council-suspect hybrid process in order to determine OU tiering. In a nutshell, anybody who attains a certain rating and deviation on the Pokemon Showdown Suspect Ladder at the end of the round will gain voting rights, while the members OU Council will automatically be qualified to vote.

This process is strikingly similar to that used for early Gen 5 tiering, though there will be no nomination period at the end of each round. Instead, the OU Council will choose the suspect or suspects prior to each round. As some of you clever folk may have deduced from the topic, on the chopping (chomping?) block this round is none other than our good pal Garchomp.

Garchomp will be fully reintroduced into OU on the Suspect Ladder, meaning it can be used with either Rough Skin or Sand Veil. The informal Suspect Ladder implemented a few weeks ago, in addition to the practice BW2 Tours, made it pretty clear that Rough Skin Garchomp isn't even close to being broken, so testing Sand Veil Garchomp will give us a means of determining what to do with Sand Veil as a whole.

The Suspect Ladder will be reset and Sand Veil Garchomp will be unbanned from the ladder on September 13th at 11:59 pm EST:.

The Suspect Round will end on September 27th at 11:59 pm EST. A voter confirmation thread will be posted containing each account that attained a rating of 1900 and deviation of 50 or lower on the Suspect Ladder at the end of the round. If you need help determining these numbers please refer to Math Nerd Aldaron. Please note that these qualifications are tentative and are subject to change depending on the size of the voting pool after the two weeks have elapsed.

On September 30th, the voter confirmation thread will be closed and the voting thread will be posted. Players who qualified to vote will have three days to cast their votes.

These tests will of course count towards earning the Tiering Contributor badge. To avoid the kerfuffle we had last time regarding active Tiering Contributors, the badge will only be awarded to individuals who have voted in four BW Suspect Tests. This spans across all tiers, and includes tests beginning when BW was just released in late 2010. In addition, in order to maintain your badge, you must have participated in a Suspect Test within the past six months. Past Gen Suspect Tests will count towards the eight votes required to obtain the Tiering Contributor alumnus badge.

That's pretty much it. Good luck to all, and may your Garchomp dodge attacks with aplomb!

Aldaron's edits: Just to clarify, a preliminary character check will be applied regardless of number of votes... so if you happen to be posting like a giant douche or acting like a dick on IRC, you won't get a badge even if you have 15 votes. Please, act nicely and remember, it's just Pokemon.

We've decided to extend the deadline by a week, meaning this round will end on October 5th at 11:59 pm EST. Since all the ratings were unfortunately reset, the requirements to vote have been lowered. These new requirements will be a rating of 1900 and a deviation of 65 or below. Keep in mind these requirements are subject to change depending how the new rating system works out. Anyone who has already qualified by sending us a screenshot of their 1900 +/- 50 rating does not need to qualify again. I apologize to anyone who was really close to meeting the requirements right before Pokemon Showdown was attacked, but there's not much we can really do. I blame Aldaron.

Moderator

Holy shit it begins now. Suspect testing is back and the debates will never end.

Also, in the future, will all suspect tests follow this pattern? I mean, if we are testing something for banning from OU, will we set up a suspect ladder with that mon banned? So you have to gain experience without seeing that pokemon to vote on it? I'm just a little confused.